174 ' erican literature with its shoes off and its hair down?' -Justin Kaplan Thoreau's pet mouse, James's punctilio, Faulkner's three-word commentary on Hollywood, along with other curiosities, eccentricities, and antics, fill this book. "Great fun -a treasure of laughs for all fans of the written word:'-Saturday Remew ' instant treasure-house, I think, for all of us who care about writers, or gossip, or both:' -John Updike ,., THE aXFaRDBOOK . _ _ ",-.' / ... _)r/: æ A:MERJ.C.AN F7 ,//.-" Û 11Y4\ ð 7 I t [ EDITED BY ])(JNALD HALL A Main ')ewction of the Reader's Subscription Book Club OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS At your bookstore, or send your check to: $15 95 Box 900-81-126 200 Madison Ave New York, N.Y. 10016 I Quick' Name the best hotels in Minneapolis. ( OH ;mb.rew) (mq.msquON q.L) m C-/' /J réferreâ ASSOCIATION Possibly the last of the great private collections See your travel agent or callSOO- 323-7500. In IllmolScallSOO-942-7 400. In Canada callSOo-661-1262. In Alaska & HawallcallSOO-323-1707 . Great Ideas- heres where you7/ find them MNG IN by Roger Horchow with Patricia Linden An international tastemaker's fresh ideas for deco- rating, entertaining, weekending, gift giving, table setting, collecting, and more. "Few people under- stand great style Few live it and fewer still can articulate it Roger Horchow does it all."-LETITIA BALDRIGE author of the Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette. Illustrated $13.95 at bookstores .. 1' " ., , 'L"'- L -..:. .InATu lhet\1t Mtt(U\. Mofe'f\u1n tJ>> <E \ 'L Þ!Ù: it.- \ .- '.' \\ .f \ "::c.r('..:'p* .. *J<- "'v t.. ........ RAW'SON \VADE store failed, and so did Grant's efforts to collect the debt In this area, he never learned: in 1884 the defalca- tions of his partners in the brokerage firm Grant & Ward left the ex- Presi- dent penniless. His father, by contrast, had been an excellent busInessman. Possibly because the author dislikes Julia Grant, who was pretentious, he understates the solvency and social sta- tus of the Grant and Dent families. According to one authority, the elder Grant had amassed about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars by 1860. The Dent landholdings, though no agribusiness, were extensive enough so that when Grant left the Army his in- laws presented him with a farm. When it proved unprofitable, his father gave him a job in one of his stores, in Galena, Illinois, which Grant left at the outset of the Civil War. McFeely accuses Grant of deserting the com- mon people, or poor folk, from whom he sprang, but in the pre-Civil War American provinces the Dents corre- spond to Europe's minor gentry and the Grants to its local notables. West Point was not for the poor; the poor became enlisted men, because they lacked the kind of educational prepa- ration that Grant had received at pri- vate schools. His simplicity of manner -his willingness to work with his I hands, for example-reflects the sim- I ' plicity of this country before the Civil W ar. Like many other Americans, Grant made two kinds of journey: from small town to big city and from prewar to postwar. The wealth of the postwar new rich-the circles in which the victorious commander was fêted-dwarfed anything the Grants had known and revived his anxiety about a suitable provision for his fam- ily: suitable was more expensive in 1865 than it had been in 1860. The nation was justly grateful to Grant, for that generation knew what we have half forgotten: the great powers of . Europe had always regarded our repub- lic as a radical experiment dangerous to them, and if disunion had prevailed it would have been a likely prelude to the recolonization of North America and-as Lincoln, who was no rhetori- cal exaggerator, pointed out at Gettys- burg-to the extinction of popular government on the globe. The voters rewarded Grant with the Presidency, which he thought his due, though he worried that by accepting it he would forfeit his Army pension. This aspect of Grant's career remains pertinent, for we have not yet discovered (I wonder if any society has) a rational